| Abstract [eng] |
Despite higher than average salaries and significant shortage of the specialists, students in Lithuania are still not eager to choose STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) career paths. Moreover, the problem exists already at the school level when a much smaller portion of graduating pupils expresses the desire to study STEM mayors. Usual theoretical perspectives – rational choice theory and socio-cultural approach – were not able to fully explain this reluctance, therefore, in this thesis the socio-psychological approach was invoked. The objective of this paper is to explain due to what reasons pupils are not interested in the STEM studies and eventually career paths. The object of the master thesis – the 12th grade pupils’ expressed desire to study STEM. In order to reach the goal, in total there were four hypotheses: H1 – parents’ beliefs regarding abilities of their children will influence their children’s expectations for success in mathematics; H2 – teachers’ beliefs regarding abilities of the students will influence students’ expectations for success in mathematics; H3a – if a student chooses a field of study based on values that reflect their identity, STEM studies will be chosen by those students who are not oriented towards the stereotypically feminine values of conservation and self-transcendence; H3b – if a student chooses a field of study based on values that reflect their identity, STEM studies will be chosen by those students who value stereotypically masculine values of openness to change and self-enhancement; H4 – students from high socio-economic status (SES) families will associate atypical values with STEM field choices. The results of binary logistic and ordinal logistic regressions, used for testing the hypotheses, confirm that beliefs of the teachers and parents’ expressed belief in children’s abilities are significant factors affecting children’s expectations for success. While expectations for success in the mathematics exam is the main predictor of STEM choices, gender was a significant factor both for expectations for success and for STEM choices directly. Girls were both having lower expectations for success despite receiving more support from the teachers and were less eager to choose STEM careers. The research also confirms that pupils were identifying particular values with STEM career paths. Pupils who wanted to work with other people were not choosing STEM while those who value work stability and career opportunities were. That means that STEM is identified as stereotypically masculine sphere. Meanwhile, pupils from high SES families were choosing STEM if they preferred creative work and did not chose to study STEM if they wanted to work with people. While they identified slightly different values with STEM, those are still stereotypically masculine values. |
